tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66567497253257462402024-03-13T11:42:30.931+01:00geek out!Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-80826058879661482872013-06-29T16:33:00.001+02:002013-06-29T16:34:12.372+02:00Animal Crossing: OdysseyNo, that's not the title of a newly announced Animal Crossing game. That's me trying to join the club and failing hard at it.<br />
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After everyone has been writing so much about their Animal Crossing: New Leaf adventures and especially after reading <a href="http://www.thegaygamer.com/search/label/Animal%20Crossing%20New%20Leaf">Bryan's adorable Animal Crossing diaries</a> I knew I could no longer wait. I wanted my own town with it's own quirky bunch of citizens to go all "aww" over. So I went out to get it yesterday... and it just wasn't meant to be, it seems. ;_;<br />
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So, none of the stores within my immediate reach had the game available, two of them awfully big electronic's stores, I also checked the toy store, book store and even our equivalent of Walmart, just for the heck of it. There's no trace of this game. Hopefully that means all the crazy AC addicts live right around the corner. 8)<br />
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But guess what? That other store, right next to the main central station, in the heart of the city, where thousands of ppl go shopping each day... those guys still got the Premium Edition available, the one with the stylus und stickers... for the same price as the normal version. Guess where I'll go now?<br />
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So, hopefully I can soon tell everyone about my New Leaf adventures as well... :)Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-74689324518666585292013-06-11T19:47:00.002+02:002013-06-26T01:55:50.463+02:00[10 Things I Love] Indie Games<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="text-align: justify;">I love lists. I love indie games. So here's a list of my ten favourite indie games.</span></div>
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<strike>Today</strike> Last week I talked to an online acquaintance of mine, who told me he's never played an indie game, becau the majority of them always looked so amateurish to him. A few years ago I probably would have agreed with him, but in the last 3 years I've found myself to have much more fun with indie games than most titles from big publishers.<br />
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Commercial indie games have made a big jump in quality and polish in the last few years and nowadays it's hard to see a difference in quality between a $60 big-name game and a less than $20 indie game. And while most of the big-name games are just more of the same old stuff we've already seen dozens of times, most indie games actually do something innovative that really makes them different. And usually also much more fun to play.<br />
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So without further ado, here are my ten favourite indie games in no particular order:</div>
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<b><u><br />
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</u></b> <b><u>Don't Starve</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.dontstarvegame.com/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Fae9tlgS3w4" width="640"></iframe> <br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-weight: bold;">Platform</b><b style="font-weight: bold;">: </b>PC, Mac (PS4 version TBD)</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-weight: bold;">Genre</b><b>: </b>RTS, survival-sim, dev-sim elements</span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: bold;">Length</b> (in hours)<b>: </b>20+</div>
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<b style="font-weight: bold;">For</b><b>: </b>survivors, explorers</div>
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<b style="font-weight: bold;">Stress</b><b>: </b>High</div>
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I love this game for its wackiness, lovely art direction and wonderful ideas. At times I feel stressed out by all the dangerous stuff that can suddenly happen as you try to survive, but it helps a lot that you can fully customize the game's settings and therefore lower / raise the difficulty to your liking. Don't Starve uses simple point & click controls, but the game never feels boring with everything that's going on around you. This game is part relaxing, part super stressful, as you can stumble upon all kinds of scary things that will kill you if you don't kill them first (or run far, far away!)</div>
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<b><u><br />
</u></b><b><u><br />
</u></b> <b><u>Reus</u> </b>(<a href="http://reusgame.com/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tgAAI7lWcRc" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>:</b> PC</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>RTS, dev-sim, god-game</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length </b><span style="text-align: justify;">(in hours)<b>: </b>20+</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>:</b> explorers, strategists</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Medium</span></div>
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Since I already wrote a review for Reus, I'll just <a href="http://geekouts.blogspot.de/2013/05/review-reus.html">direct you there</a> for detailed info on this gem.</div>
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Let me just add, that I've put more than 40 hours into this game now and I can still not see myself getting sick of it anytime soon. ;><br />
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<b><u><br />
</u></b> <b><u>Cherry Tree High Comedy Club</u> </b>(<a href="http://cherrytreehigh.com/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/08pItQiNBv4" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>:</b> PC</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>stat-raising, life-sim, visual novel</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length </b><span style="text-align: justify;">(in hours)<b>: </b>~10</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>readers, strategists</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Low</span></div>
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Young high-school student Miley loves comedy. She even dreams of becoming a great comedian.. and the first step to reach that goal is, of course, to start a comedy club in school. But to start a club, you need at least 5 members, so you've got the summer holidays to raise Miley's conversation skills and find people from school to befriend and convince them to join her comedy club.<br />
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CTHCC uses a pretty unique style for a visual novel type of game, as it's completely in side scrolling perspective. You can run around town to interact with ppl, pick up items, work to earn some money or raise Miley's various conversation stats. I also found the story and characters quite entertaining, so I'd recommend this to anyone who's curious about stat-raising sims... this is a pretty good representation of the genre and a perfect place to start. :)</div>
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<b><u><br />
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</u></b> <b><u>Magical Diary</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.hanakogames.com/magical_diary.shtml">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YZ1Kwu0kGMc" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>PC, Mac</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>stat-raising, magic school-sim, puzzle, visual novel</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length </b><span style="text-align: justify;">(in hours)<b>: </b>~10</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>readers, strategists, role-players</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Low</span><br />
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You create your own avatar and start your first day as a magic student at some mysterious magic school. While you take magic lessons to prepare for the school exams (in form of puzzle dungeons with multiple solutions), you meet all kinds of people and make friends as well as enemies.<br />
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There's magic, multiple endings, Girl x Boy & Girl x Girl relationships and so much content that it will take multiple playthroughs to see it all.</div>
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<b><u><br />
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</u></b> <b><u>Long Live The Queen</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.hanakogames.com/llq.shtml">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pfRmag-zkQE" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>PC, Mac</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>stat-raising, life-sim, visual novel</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length</b><span style="text-align: justify;"> (in hours)<b>: </b>~10</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>masochists, readers, strategists</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Low</span></div>
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<i>Rule the world or die trying.</i><br />
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You control the life of Elodie, the young queen to be and your goal is to help her survive until her coronation at the end of the year. That's easier said than done tho, as there is tons of evils lurking in the shadows, trying to kill our cute princess. Which makes this game pretty frustrating. And yet half the fun of the game is finding more ways for Elodie to die. 8) To have her survive til she becomes queen, you have to choose the right answers and have her learn the skills needed to survive all the dangerous situation she finds herself in.</div>
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<b><u><br />
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</u></b> <b><u>Botanicula</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.botanicula.net/">website</a>)<br />
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<b style="text-align: center;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: center;"><b>:</b> PC, Mac, iPad</span><br />
<b style="text-align: center;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: center;"><b>: </b>point & click adventure</span><br />
<b style="text-align: center;">Length </b><span style="text-align: center;">(in hours)<b>: </b>~5</span><br />
<b style="text-align: center;">For</b><span style="text-align: center;"><b>: </b>explorers</span><br />
<b style="text-align: center;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: center;"><b>: </b>Low</span></div>
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The cutest point & click adventure in existence. Way too short, but absolutely adorable. Very beautiful and immersive, even tho there's not even single line of spoken dialogue. I'm pretty sure anyone, except for those that absolutely need thrilling action in their games, would enjoy this. :)<br />
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Also: An awesome game to play with children (of any age, really).</div>
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<b><u><br />
</u></b> <b><u><br />
</u></b> <b><u>Bastion</u> </b>(<a href="http://supergiantgames.com/index.php/media/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mX48y24t9iU" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>PC, Mac, iOS, Xbox 360</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>action RPG</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length </b><span style="text-align: justify;">(in hours)<b>: </b>~10</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>adventurers</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Medium</span></div>
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While this is an action RPG, even people like me, who totally suck at action-y stuff can play this without frustration thanks to the option of unlimited lives. :D But there's enough of a challenge for action veterans as well! Bastion is a fun RPG gameplay-wise and a stunning experience storytelling-wise, thanks to the superb narration by Logan Cunningham. And it's also very pretty on top of that. :)</div>
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<b><u><br />
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</u></b> <b><u>Lone Survivor</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.lonesurvivor.co.uk/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Xtt0ZezljHk" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>PC, Mac (PS3/PS Vita Q3 2013)</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>survival-horror</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length </b><span style="text-align: justify;">(in hours)<b>: </b>~5</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>zombie hunters, explorers</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>High</span></div>
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Never have I feared a bunch of beige pixels more than in this game... Lone Survivor plays with atmosphere, sound-effects and the theme of loneliness in a way that really gets under your skin. Or at least mine. I screamed like a little girl the whole time.. ;></div>
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</u></b> <b><u>Home</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.homehorror.com/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mGR3ggaWnS4" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>:</b> PC (Mac & iOS planned)</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>horror-adventure, mystery</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length </b><span style="text-align: justify;">(in hours)<b>: </b>~3</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>explorers</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Medium</span></div>
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Like Lone Survivor, Home is also a game that's playing a lot with atmosphere, sounds and the theme of lonliness, as you try to figure out what exactly happened to you and the people in your life and find your way back home...</div>
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<b><u><br />
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</u></b> <b><u>FTL: Faster Than Light</u> </b>(<a href="http://www.ftlgame.com/">website</a>)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lQ4FRcu_bjs" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>PC, Mac</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike" style="text-align: justify;">roguelike</a><span style="text-align: justify;">, RTS, sci-fi sim</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length</b><span style="text-align: justify;"> (in hours)<b>: </b>20+</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>masochists, strategists, explorers</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Medium</span></div>
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a.k.a. Frustration - The Game<br />
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Yes, this game can be insanely frustrating at times, thanks to random events that will lead to your untimely death. And dying means starting over from the beginning. But the same randomness makes each playthrough unique and fun. Being the captain of your own spaceship, managing your ship & crew while trying to get the extremely important cargo you're carrying on board of your ship through the dangerous parts of space, stumbling upon various events along your way... it always feels a bit like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)">Firefly</a> to me. So when I'm not naming the captain & crew after myself and my friends, I name them after the Serenity's crew. :></div>
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And because it's so fun, here's a little extra:</div>
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<u><b><br />
</b></u> <u><b><br />
</b></u> <u><b>Journey</b></u> (<a href="http://us.playstation.com/games/journey-ps3.html">website</a>)<br />
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<b style="text-align: justify;">Platform</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>PS3</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Genre</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Adventure</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Length</b><span style="text-align: justify;"> (in hours)<b>: </b>~5</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">For</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>explorers</span><br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Stress</b><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>: </b>Low</span><br />
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By now I'm pretty sure almost everyone, even those without a PS3, have heard of Journey. Explaining the game is pretty hard for me, as there isn't really much you do, at least at first, besides wandering through this insanely beautiful desert and collecting paper thingies that will make the mysterious protagonist's cape grow, which in return will let him float in the air longer.<br />
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It's the game's atmosphere, its soundtrack and beautiful landscape that makes the game so very special. There is no voiced narration at all and even if you play online with a stranger, you'll never hear anyone's voice. You just walk around and explore the vast world in front of you, which is why this game is exactly what its name indicates: A journey.<br />
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And that's all for today. But of course there are dozens of other great indie games out there and I hope this glimpse on what to expect from indie games got some of you curious enough to see what else indie devs have to offer... :)<br />
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I think I'll make this "10 Things I Love" thing a regular one... and not just because it's incredibly fun to do a mash-up image of so much stuff I love... XD I'll probably go with my 10 favourite DS games or anime series next. Which would you guys prefer to see first? ;P</div>
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Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-4675785557326963312013-05-20T20:13:00.000+02:002013-05-21T14:36:32.789+02:00[Review] Reus <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Pcjw09VaArE/UZotIChtSuI/AAAAAAAABSE/Qj244-Mrrvk/s1600/logo_reus.png"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Pcjw09VaArE/UZotIChtSuI/AAAAAAAABSE/Qj244-Mrrvk/s1600/logo_reus.png" /></a><br /><br />For the last 6 months I've been on the lookout for any new development-sims that cater to my tastes, something fun, not too stressful & action-y, yet challenging & rewarding. And preferably in cute 2D. Imagine my surprise when Reus got released on Steam a couple of days ago. "This is it!", I thought. And I was right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />So what exactly is Reus? The official description of the devs probably says it best:<br /><br /><i><span style="color: #444444;">"Reus is a god game by <a href="http://abbeygames.com/"><b>Abbey Games</b></a> in which you take control of nature through the hands of mighty giants. You possess all imaginable powers over nature! There is only one thing on the planet that you do not control: mankind, with all their virtues and and all their vices. You can shape their world, but not their will. It’s your responsibility to maintain a balance in which man is not overpowered by nature, and nature does not fall to man’s greed."</span></i><br /><br />If I absolutely have to compare it to other games, a crossbreed of god games like Populous, Black & White, From Dust plus dev-sims like Settlers & Anno would be the best I could come up with.<br /><br />It surely has similarities, yet isn't really like any of them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You start off with 4 giants, or "Reus" as is the dutch word for it, and a whole planet you can freely form as you want. These 4 giants are all you can control in this game, humans act on their own, but of course your giants have their ways to influence them a little... </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ICwvW7UnBJE/UZotHjX__NI/AAAAAAAABR4/l_yU_133YfE/s1600/2013-05-20_00006.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ICwvW7UnBJE/UZotHjX__NI/AAAAAAAABR4/l_yU_133YfE/s640/2013-05-20_00006.jpg" /></a><br />I fondly call those 4 giants Stony, Crabby, Woody & Swampy. <br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Okay, I actually called them Steini, Krabbi, Waldi and Sumpfi up til now, as Stein, Krabbe, Wald and Sumpf are the German words for stone, crab, forest and swamp... ;D)</span><br /><br />Each of them has unique abilities, Stony can create mountain & desert biomes and mineral resources (providing your tiny little humans with wealth & tech), while Crabby is in charge of creating oceans biomes that give your planet the necessary water for forest & swamp biomes, he can also create animals that provide food. As you might have guessed already, Woody creates forests biomes as well as food plants, while Swampy creates swamp biomes as well as tech plants and animals that give wealth to your people. <br /><br /><br />As soon as you create one of the three habitable biomes (desert, forest & swamp) and place some plants, animals or minerals on it, a village will settle down near the resources and the real challenge starts.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tDCG2UJS6PM/UZotG58E8hI/AAAAAAAABRg/qDOv0qzObXs/s1600/2013-05-20_00003.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tDCG2UJS6PM/UZotG58E8hI/AAAAAAAABRg/qDOv0qzObXs/s640/2013-05-20_00003.jpg" /></a></span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IDVK0bj-B68/UZotHOT30sI/AAAAAAAABRs/lh6jsQiH0xM/s1600/2013-05-20_00004.jpg" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IDVK0bj-B68/UZotHOT30sI/AAAAAAAABRs/lh6jsQiH0xM/s640/2013-05-20_00004.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br />There's two different modes for this game, Era and Free Play - in Era mode you have a time limit of 30, 60 (unlocked at lvl2) or 120 (lvl3) minutes, within this time you are free to do whatever you want but by fulfilling certain requirements (e.g. "Finish an Era with a Desert Village which has 100 Village Prosperity." or "Have humans complete a Druid Project."), you gain levels and unlock more sources and projects.<br /><br />Food, Tech and Wealth are a village's main resource stats and they are needed to complete projects. Projects start spawning soon after a village has settled down in a biome. Sometimes they want to build a school or a druid would like to open his questionable business next to a village. To make this happen, your village needs enough resources in use, the druid for example needs the village to have 30 tech, before he can set up camp there, while the school would need 15 food and 15 tech to be completed.<br /><br /><br />Villages have two resource values. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The amount that is currently in use and the total amount of everything within the village's borders:<br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6d_skpBPg6Q/UZpHFeB45mI/AAAAAAAABSY/0pmiCCCMKL8/s1600/2013-05-20_00007.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6d_skpBPg6Q/UZpHFeB45mI/AAAAAAAABSY/0pmiCCCMKL8/s640/2013-05-20_00007.jpg" /></a><br /><br />The amount that's in use constantly grows as the game continues until both values are the same. The higher the difference between "resources in use" and "total value of resources within borders" (which I'll just call "max amount" from now on, for convenience) is, the quicker it grows. So if you have no wealth in use but quickly put a lot of wealth resources within your city borders so the max amount goes up to 100 wealth, the village will have about 50 wealth in use within a few seconds, while it will take well over 10 seconds to get just one more point in use if the difference is lower than 10 (e.g. 90/100). <br /><br />As the game continues, projects get harder and harder to fulfill, so you need to take advantage of two different gameplay elements: Symbiosis & Transmuting!<br /><br />Each plant, animal and mineral has certain symbiosis requirements, some animals give more food if they are placed next to other animals or certain plants etc. Keeping track of what gives the best values next to what is a very important element of the game. As is transmuting! By adding certain aspects (via giant skills) to your resources they can gain the ability to upgrade into a new, better providing plant/animal/mineral - but this can sometimes backfire with symbiosis incompatibility, so you'll often need to replace old resources with other ones (you can just build new stuff on top of existing stuff, but the old resource will be gone then).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At first you might want to keep the <a href="http://wiki.reusgame.com/">Reus Wiki</a> open while playing the game, since there is so much stuff to keep track off... each biome has it's own specific plants and animals, some special minerals and it takes quite some time to let it all sink in.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mr6mYIfdLgg/UZpHFq8ighI/AAAAAAAABSc/1dtsvKBBTX8/s1600/2013-05-20_00008.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mr6mYIfdLgg/UZpHFq8ighI/AAAAAAAABSc/1dtsvKBBTX8/s640/2013-05-20_00008.jpg" /></a><br /><br />For each successfully completed project a village will give you an "Ambassador", for letting them travel with you they'll provide you with new skills and/or skill upgrades. But you'll need to evenly distribute the ambassadors among your giants, as a giant can't pick another one up if any of the other giants has less ambassadors riding on him - this provides a good balance to the game, as you can't just massively overpower one giant and make him ruler of the planet. ;)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Each of the habitable biomes gives you a different ambassador that teaches an individual skill to each giant, so you won't be able to unlock all of a giant's skills with just a forest village, you'll eventually need a village in each biome if you want to teach 'em all. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Projects are divided into different levels, the druid is a level one project for example and can later on upgrade into a lvl 2 mad scientist... 8) The more ambassadors your giants pick up, the less can you please humanity with low level projects, so they won't give you ambassadors when you complete a lvl 1 project any longer. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And there's still a lot more to the gameplay.... A village's prosperity is determined by the total value of resources in use, the more prosperity you gain, the more nomads will spawn and look for a place to settle down and start a new village. But if a village grows too quickly it will get greedy and is more likely to attack other villages or even your giants! To stop villages from getting too greedy you can surround them with dangerous animals or fulfill symbiosis conditions that provide awe points to your village. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or you just let Stony smash the village to bits before they can turn on you. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><img border="0" height="480" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mr9lyWkXyMc/UZpX7De4C6I/AAAAAAAABSw/wqVd62ukeXs/s640/2013-05-20_00009.jpg" width="640" /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br />Reus is pretty complex and it might take a while to get really comfortable with it, as you've got to memorise a lot of stuff, but it's rarely frustrating (apart from the occasional "a village decided to suddenly attack one of my giants and killed him 1 minute before the era would have ended"-awesomeness, but the autosave feature is usually pretty competent and had let me jump back to a few minutes earlier to fix things before they get out of hand each time so far). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's a refreshing take on the RTS genre, it's incredibly beautiful to look at and very addicting. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And unlike <a href="http://www.ftlgame.com/"><b>FTL</b></a> (aka Frustration - The Game) and <a href="http://www.dontstarvegame.com/"><b>Don't Starve</b></a> (Which is actually more of a RTSSS game - a Real Time Strategy Starvation Survival game...), both two indie RTS games I've grown extremly fond of in the past few months, I won't have to fear to get a game over screen every second with Reus. :)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can freely save whenever you want, if you plant a displeasing source somewhere, you can replace it with something else right away - there's no limit to how often you can use your giant's skills, they merely have a cooldown of some seconds before you can use them again (for some skills it's shorter, for some it's longer, as usual). There was rarely a point where messed up so bad that I couldn't somehow fix it again without restarting the game, yet that does in no way mean this game is too easy. It keeps you plenty of busy and if you don't keep track of all your villages they might start doing stuff you won't appreciate. ;)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's incredibly fun to see what you can transmute your sources to, figuring out all the symbioses, making up a strategy for each of your different villages, unlocking new things and trying them out in the next game. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Highly recommended to any dev-sim fan out there and definitely worth every cent! The game can be bought for $9,99 via Steam, GOG and various other platforms as well as the <a href="http://reusgame.com/buy"><b>official website</b></a> (which also includes a Steam key).</span></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-66525643302392257782013-04-08T20:55:00.000+02:002013-04-08T20:56:33.184+02:00[Review] The Testament of Sherlock Holmes<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Part of me really wants to love this game and the other part just wants to puke from all the motion sickness this game has caused me, simply because of bad camera control. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Speaking of bad control... the awful controls for this game are seriously it's biggest downside. I've never played any of the 3D Sherlock Holmes games before, so I didn't really know what I was getting myself into... my gaming-bestie J had some more experience with the Sherlock Holmes games (besides our recent adventure with "The Case of the Rose Tattoo", awful old & slow game, yet it still got better controls than this recent entry...) and wasn't as appalled by the controls as I was. She still agrees that they sucked tho. Badly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We played the game on PC and tried both using the 360 controller and the mouse/keyboard combo, but walking into a desired direction can prove quite a challenge with both styles. Getting a bit more control over the camera proves to be less of a hassle with the right analogue stick on the controller, but you basically have to rotate and adjust it all the time or else you're suddenly looking at a tree/wall/whatever from a 3cm distance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I don't know at what point Watson stopped being <a href="http://youtu.be/8IWQk8zmpOs">creepy Watson</a> and instead became insanely annoying "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY, YOU IMBECILE!"-Watson, but it's the case for this game. Often times Watson will block your way and it's frustratingly annoying to walk around him... or walk around anything else, really. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Small rooms often provide quite the challenge (of the wrong kind) as well. Positioning the camera in a way so you can actually see anything isn't quite as easy as it should be. Maybe not using the ego-perspective was our problem, maybe the game would run more smoothly that way, but besides the fact it would totally worsen my motion sickness (I usually NEVER get motion sickness in third-person/over the shoulder kind of games... so I don't even want to think what would happen if I played this with a first-person view) it's not exactly how point & click adventures should be... imo. :(</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We mastered the controls, eventually, or at least got used enough to them to play through that whole thing anyway. And it's actually quite fun and captivating. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One thing that bothered me a little was the high amount of gore. I can stomach quite a bit blood and all but dude, you shouldn't eat anything while playing this game. (Combine this with my motion sickness and you're in for a wonderful puke ride... :D)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Admittedly, it was part of the story and there was a perfectly fine reason for all the... wounds, but still, I could have done with a bit less of that. Or at least less zoomed in. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Story wise we get to listen to Sherlock's (great?) grand children ("What the!?" you think, like we did when we started the game? Well, it all gets explained at the end of the game. :>) who find one of Watson's </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">memoirs of Sherlock Holmes' cases. From there it's a constant mix of cutscenes, searching for clues, solving puzzles and running around until the case finally gets completely solved so even Watson gets it. (Hoo boy, it always amazes me how stupid Watson is...)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's a worthy story for a Sherlock Holmes game, the end was surprisingly satisfying (more so than the last of the original Sherlock Holmes stories) and most of the puzzles were very fun to solve, tho they really could have been a bit more explanation as for what exactly you're supposed to do in some cases.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My favourite part of the game was probably the (return of the) deduction board. I loved finding all the clues and bringing all the gained information together in a way that makes sense... :)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I probably would have never finished the game if I had played it all by myself, as the game get easily frustrating when you're stuck and all the control-issues would have bothered me way too much, but together with J it was quite fun. But for a game of this generation it simply has too many faults to be considered a good game. It's a good Sherlock-story and it got neat puzzles, but it's an awful video game.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Depending on what system you play it on the game can look anything from "pretty rad" to "somehow disturbing & creepy". My PC isn't the latest high-end shit, so it definitely looked crappier that those official screenshots I borrowed. ;> Characters would often look a lot more creepy than they were supposed to... (especially the grand children, they looked immensely creepy with their shiny skin!) The scenery of 19th century London looked quite lovely tho.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All in all I can't really recommend this game unless you're really into adventure games and/or Sherlock Holmes. Or totally don't mind the awful controls. I had my fun with it, but I wouldn't go back there again. Ever.</span></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-77337252728247149812013-04-05T03:18:00.000+02:002013-04-05T03:18:47.031+02:00Just two more weeks...... until Fire Emblem finally gets released over here and let me tell you, I'm seriously in danger of getting a heart attack from all my excitement.<br />
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I can't wait.<br />
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On other news, I've been catching up with a few TV series in the past few days since I didn't really feel like gaming... and had to do some serious cleaning. And what's more perfect than watching your favourite series while folding the laundry and sorting your paper work?<br />
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So I finished season 3 of Haven and all I can say is wth is going on there!? I seriously have no idea what to expect from the next season, but if it's as weird and exciting as the third was then I'll be pleased. :><br />
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And Doctor Who started off just perfect. I love the new companion! Can't wait for Saturday's new episode. Can't wait for that damn 50th anniversary special. It's gonna be so good! *_*<br />
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Psych is as adorable as always. I'm still amazed how it never gets boring to watch Shawn and Gus be, well, Shawn and Gus. I really hope this series will stay for another two or three seasons. It's just so perfect. 8)<br />
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I'm still a bit on the fence about Community so far, you definitely notice the change of direction in the new season with Dan Harmon gone, but I wouldn't say it's as bad as a lot of people been claiming. It's still funny and weird. And it still got Abed. It's just a little different... well, I'll wait til the end of the season until I decide what I think of it. :)<br />
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And then there's Lost Girl... you know, it took me two seasons to decide if I like this series or not and I was a little bit disappointed about the whole Bo x Lauren outcome (I just agree too much with Kenz about Bo's romantic life ;>) but season 3 keeps delivering pretty well. Now if Vex would finally return I'd be all pleased.<br />
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Now all there's left is catching up with New Girl, Grimm, Being Human (UK) & Fringe (I kinda keep pushing the latter away, since I'm scared I'll hate the end of the series.) And of course there's that new episode of Elementary that needs some serious watching right now. So, I'll do just that.<br />
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p.s.: Is anyone else as excited as I am about the <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project">Veronica Mars movie project</a>?Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-74417772006755837682013-03-31T22:55:00.001+02:002013-04-05T03:19:11.173+02:00[Review] Atelier Ayesha - The Alchemist of Dusk<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By now I've played through the game twice, did everything there is to do and watched all the endings. And while Meruru is still my number one when it comes to Atelier games, Ayesha is a pretty close second.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've got to admit tho, that it took me quite a while to really get into the game. Unlike other titles from the Atelier series, Ayesha gives you a lot of freedom. An overwhelming amount of it. Combine that with Gust's not-so-very-in-depth tutorials and you are sure to be confused by the game at some point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To me it kinda feels like Gust want you to explore Atelier games yourself first, figure out how things work and then own the games with all your knowledge on your second playthrough. Even if you can basically complete & see everything there is on your first playthrough with Ayesha, it still gives off the same vibe. And it's still fun to do so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But let's start with what the Atelier series is about, for those of you that have never heard of it before, and what has changed for this new title and then I'll talk about how it all adds up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The traditional Atelier games (pre-Iris & post-Mana Khemia) aren't your traditional JRPG fare. A deep battle system and epic stories of heroism aren't the focus in these games, no, instead you take on the role of a young girl trying to find her way in the world while becoming an Alchemy master. Let me quote <a href="http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/953050-atelier-annie-alchemists-of-sera-island/52080680">someone from gamefaqs</a> who summed it up quite nicely: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"<i>Okay, you know how every RPG has the grand heroes chosen by fate to become wonderful friends and stand up to the evil sorcerer / empire / corporation / monster and keep it from destroying the world? </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>This game is not about them. </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>You know how in almost every RPG, buried about halfway down the final dungeon, sitting next to the second to last save point in the game there's a shopkeeper who has every healing item in the game and every weapon or bit of armor that doesn't require an epic quest? The one who leaves you wondering: "Just how in blazes did she get down here? I'm the ridiculously powerful chosen one and it's almost impossible for me to do it, so how did a lowly shopkeeper pull it off"? </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>This game is about <b>her</b>. </i>"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These games are more about strategy and planning than grinding your way through dungeons. You have a time limit (usually 3 years) and actions like battles, synthesizing, item gathering and wandering around the world map will use up time. To get a good ending you need to trigger certain events in time, some by fulfilling quests, others by taking your friends to certain places or being at the right place at the right time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A lot of RPG gamers found this time limit to be annoying and unusual when it first got introduced to the West with Atelier Rorona, but I see it as a challenge and I love planning ahead in general. I love managing my time and resources in the best way possible, so the traditional Atelier-style does suit rather me well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now while time limits were a rather strict (& pretty frustrating) thing in the first entry of the Arland series (Rorona), Totori was already a bit more forgiving and Meruru didn't really put any serious pressure on the player anymore. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">With Ayesha things get even more relaxed. While you needed to complete some goals before specific dates in the other games to avoid getting an early bad end, your only limit this time around are the 3 years of in-game time. You can finish the main story as quickly or slowly as you want within that time. There are almost no events you can miss, events that only happen on a specific date are very rare (and not even required for any of the endings/trophies), getting friend events does no longer require you to take a person to a specific place on a specific date and the likes, most of them will instead be automatically triggered on the world map when you pass a "trigger-place" with that person in your party. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ayesha is practically the first Atelier game where you really don't need a guide to get all endings, something which can even be achieved on your very first playthrough, a huge plus imo, even though I really enjoy playing through the Atelier games a second time, a lot of gamers do not want to be forced to do that to see everything and for most games I wouldn't want to either. Free time is usually a rather rare thing for adult-gamers and it's good to see more developers reacting to that. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now let's get a bit more into detail...</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Graphics (3D):</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The graphics are utterly beautiful. Especially the textures of the character's clothes and hair are so well done. Such a gentle, hand-drawn look. By now Gust has truly mastered the art of cel-shading. The nature and cities in Ayesha were also very nice to look at but as in all Gust games I always feel like they could need a little more detail (and nicer plant textures).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The character models definitely need more animation, especially facial expressions. Moving mouthes, occasional blinking and changing the position of an character's arm just isn't enough anymore. It would be really nice to see them change their gestures and expressions a bit more during the dialogue scenes to make them more lively.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The walking/running animations still look as stiff to me as they did in all previous games. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's <b>very</b> <b>little</b> variation in enemy design. Most new areas only get recolours of previous enemies. But at least all of them look pretty cool or cute (or both).</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Graphics (2D):</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For Ayesha Gust got a new artist, Hidari, who replaces Mel Kishida from the Arland series. The transition from the 2D designs to the 3D models works a lot better with Hidari's art style compared to Mel's style.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The 2D event scenes are all very pretty, but some of them don't even have much of a background besides some pink shoujo manga sparkles and other glittery stuff and pastel colours, something that often bothers me about games that use event CGs, it's fine if it's a close-up of the faces, but other than that they should get rid of the cheap-background-habit. I also found the girl characters to be too "super-deformed" a few times... while the dudes always seemed to look pretty cool no matter what. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sound:</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I really liked the soundtrack, especially the vocal tracks, like the beautiful opening song that often made me forget about loading my saved game and instead listen to it in full again:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then there's songs like the creepy "<a href="http://youtu.be/egy8un_ucuA">Silent Hill</a>", the jazzy "<a href="http://youtu.be/0G9_fjhlCC4">Doctor Strange</a>" (I see where you get your inspiration, Gust.. ;D) or the beautiful "<a href="http://youtu.be/__uWvBsbVIA">Maria</a>"... "<a href="http://youtu.be/0TEdQgHPhJ4">Seeking Treasure</a>" made me think of Ar Tonelico and <a href="http://youtu.be/7CXWF2i-lz0">these</a> <a href="http://youtu.be/TMd7g84syEE">two</a> are just so wondrous & magical... And then there's always the fabulous "<a href="http://youtu.be/JhHUCIl9l3I">Bug Tango</a>" (I think that's what it translates to? ^^;), which isn't exactly a new song, but still one of my favourites. How it mocks you with all it's silliness and yet still ends up sounding catchy and sexy. 8)</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Gameplay:</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Gameplay-wise things haven't changed too much. It's still a rather basic turn-based system, with speed-based turns and support-actions that can be triggered outside of a character's turn. The battle system might be a small step-back from Meruru, being a bit more simple, and besides adding in-battle-movement there's nothing new about it, but it works well and since you don't have to spend all your time fighting & grinding, it doesn't need to get too boring either. Battles have a quick flow, animations are speedy and I didn't find myself being annoyed or bored by doing a couple of fights like I was with Fate/Extra. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The main focus is of course on the alchemy system and they did a damn good job with Ayesha's alchemy system... it IS very confusing at first, but that moment, when it clicks in your head and you finally know what exactly you're doing... that's the moment you might start having some real fun with it. I know I did. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you don't... don't worry too much, the game doesn't really force you to do any alchemy if you don't want to. Almost everything (you need) can be gotten some other way and what little you do need to synthesize doesn't require you to have a super high alchemy lvl either. :)</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K1ffH28qiyQ/UViQoKqjv7I/AAAAAAAABPQ/Gq8rA6gBKYg/s1600/177835_509683715742491_1247402187_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K1ffH28qiyQ/UViQoKqjv7I/AAAAAAAABPQ/Gq8rA6gBKYg/s640/177835_509683715742491_1247402187_o.jpg" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Other than doing alchemy or battling your way through the gathering places and dungeons, you can take care of requests by town folk to earn some money and collect memory points. Said memory points can be spent to write down Ayesha's memories into her journal, which will give her various bonuses like new recipes, stat boosts or being able to create more items in alchemy in one go. There's also the bi-yearly Treasure Contest in which you can show off rare items and win prizes.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Characters:</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I think this was my only problem with the game. While I liked a lot of the characters, I didn't really care too much for most of them for the first half of the game. Ayesha herself was probably the one I had the biggest problems with. I just don't get her. Right from the start she seems way too laid back, sheltered and oblivious to the world to me. So her little sister goes missing, the only family member that she's got left dies and what does she do? Shut herself into her workshop to produce tons of medicine, her only contact to the outside world being a travelling salesman named Ernie, who she considers to be one of her best friends and about once a year she visits the nearby city, where her other best friend Regina lives...?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Who would actually do that? Isn't that the most boring life ever? If Regina is such a good friend of hers, why doesn't she visit her more often? Why doesn't she travel around with Ernie every once in a while, if just to gather some other materials at other places to make better/different medicine. Much, much later in the game she also talks about how it's bad to just gather at one place the whole time, since things won't grow back so fast and all. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She contradicts herself quite a few times, like in one of Regina's early scenes you learn that they've known each other for a long time and Ayesha considers her a close friend. In another scene, she meets two characters who've been friends since their teenage years and then she goes all: "Ohhhh, I wish I had a childhood friend as well."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Huh? Isn't that what Regina is? And Ernie? I mean, if you're 17 and have know them for a few years then it pretty much means you've met them while you were a child, hence them being your childhood friends.... RIGHT?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And oh, how oblivious she is to romance. It's exhausting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I started liking most characters fairly well after a while and I even liked Ayesha in most scenes, she's not dumb or annoying and in some of the endings she's really fun and/or cool. But most of the game she just doesn't seem like she's really trying to change anything and nothing about her character really gets explained. And she's just not as fun as Meruru or as adorable as Totori. She does have her moments tho and she's not a bad character... she just doesn't seem to be a good heroine. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I ended up liking the non-party members like Kyle, Marietta & Tanya far more than most of the playable characters... Except for Keith, because he's simply badass and awesome.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All in all Ayesha is a very good game and might be the best entry point for newcomers, as it doesn't really punish you for exploring as much as you want, but rather encourages you to do so. It lets you get the good endings without having to plan out every single in-game day, you can even platinum the thing in one go. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And since the Dusk series starts off with an entirely new universe and there are no returning characters it's absolutely not required to know the other games. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Be aware tho, that unlike ALL other Atelier games, this one does not have a Japanese voice track, but instead just a PARTIAL English dub. It's a pretty good dub tho (for NISA standards, who still localized the game, despite Tecmo-Koei being the publisher now) and it sounds A LOT like the Japanese dub. Ayesha sounds basically the same in both languages. Which goes for almost all characters and I've got to admit, that they did a superb job with the casting. The lack of voices in about half of the scenes is a bummer tho. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Still, it's a great game, it's a beautiful game, it's a fun game. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And it's not just a game for girls. :)</span></div>
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Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-12427456887162650152013-03-06T23:51:00.001+01:002013-04-05T03:19:24.861+02:00Installing Atelier Ayesha...... and while I'm waiting for that to finish (oh, why are you so damn slow at installing games, PS3?) I'd like to share my thoughts on Ayesha before playing the game and then we'll see how much they might change (or not) while I'm playing through it... ;><br />
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- I'm a little disappointed that the game has no dual-audio. I'm not exactly that much into Japanese dubs, tho I admittedly have this huge crush on Takehito Koyasu's voice, but I do find a lot of American dubs rather unpleasing to the ears. It's mostly the girl characters, with way older woman trying to voice a teenage girl, that get annoying to me easily... Japanese voice actresses can somehow pull this off, but I've never heard a good dub in a non-Asian language where a 30+ old woman can pull off a 16 y/o girl's voice. I haven't heard any of the US voice actors besides Ayesha's so far, but I'm a little scared that I won't like the voices much. I think British voice actors would suit the Atelier series' style so much more, since the city designs always have such a European style (and I think the original PSOne games were set in Germany?) - but oh well, let's see how I feel about the voice acting when I play the game... maybe it's not that bad. :)<br />
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- I really love the new art style. As I've seen many mention before, I agree that the new artist's style suits the 3D cel shading models a lot more! The animations of the characters still feel a little bland tho, from what I've seen in videos and lip synching is pretty much non-existent. But still, I think it looks the best out of all the Atelier games so far and I like the simplistic menu design a lot as well.<br />
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- I'm looking forward to the story and characters a lot, since this time the theme is a bit more mature compared to the Arland series... not that I didn't find the cuteness of the Arland series charming and all, but I really like me some good drama, so yay!<br />
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Well, game's installed, so let's see how much I'll love this game then... :)Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-20904713408523153922013-02-28T12:46:00.000+01:002013-04-05T03:19:39.414+02:00The Curse of the Typist's Cramp...<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or maybe we should call it a gamer's cramp in my case. Why is it even called a "typist's" cramp? I never get cramps from typing... writing with a pen, yeah, but typing? Anyway, got me an awful tenosynovitis (TSV) in my right wrist. This is nothing new for me, as I've had plenty in the past and I've got a splint at home in case I get another one anyway.. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn't get one for quite a few years tho and this time it's from playing on the Vita. I already noticed the past couple of days that playing on the Vita for more than an hour or two would make my right thumb hurt a lot. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And you know why?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just because some awful idiot in the US thought that back whenever the PSOne came over to the West switching the confirmation button from O to X would be a greaaaat idea. WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK THAT?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been bothered by this for years, but now my annoyance has reached it's peak... as I've been playing a lot on the Vita lately I've noticed how extremely awkwardly your thumb is </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">placed</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> if you rest it on the X button. You have to either keep it in an extremely uncomfortable crooked position or rest it on the right stick as well... both of these methods start getting painful after a few minutes. .__.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now if you try resting your thumb on the O button, which in general is the confirmation button in all Japanese developed games, you notice it's a lot more comfortable and natural:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HMIS05Pn6-0/US4dONykfUI/AAAAAAAABKQ/guCJaIP7KPI/s640/IMG_9942.jpg" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I feel like writing a long letter to Sony in hopes they'll offer to reconfigure my O and X buttons input, so that O would be linked to X and X to O.. I wonder if they'd actually do it. I mean, I could probably do it myself and I will if Sony doesn't do anything as soon as my warranty expires... for now I'll take a break from P4G, which is sad, since I just beat the last boss and only got a month of in-game time left to wrap things up. ;_;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But oh well, in the mean time I'll just amuse myself (and maybe some of you as well?) with a probably <b>NSFW </b>screenshot collection of Personae resembling genitals and other dirty stuff that made me grin while playing Persona 4 Golden.. pretty much spoiler free.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, if we're talking about penis shaped Personae, there's no way to not mention Mara...</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-diug0qnW9xA/US846Z6_eyI/AAAAAAAABLA/ki7J_MekCB4/s1600/2013-02-28-113801.jpg"><img border="0" height="364" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-diug0qnW9xA/US846Z6_eyI/AAAAAAAABLA/ki7J_MekCB4/s640/2013-02-28-113801.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0QwdLjN2Um4/US846X6t0-I/AAAAAAAABK8/LeZ-hHuvoNc/s1600/2013-02-28-113807.jpg"><img border="0" height="363" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0QwdLjN2Um4/US846X6t0-I/AAAAAAAABK8/LeZ-hHuvoNc/s640/2013-02-28-113807.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Hell yeah, let's penetrate the darkness!</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Futxh99EFuc/US8469L7olI/AAAAAAAABLI/GRjEugQJAik/s1600/2013-02-28-113815.jpg"><img border="0" height="364" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Futxh99EFuc/US8469L7olI/AAAAAAAABLI/GRjEugQJAik/s640/2013-02-28-113815.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uGVtzDIWP0s/US847f_rkcI/AAAAAAAABLQ/A7vd2ueDsw0/s1600/2013-02-28-114036.jpg"><img border="0" height="364" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uGVtzDIWP0s/US847f_rkcI/AAAAAAAABLQ/A7vd2ueDsw0/s640/2013-02-28-114036.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Yep, I can totally imagine something like that to emerge from my soul...</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xEMBPjlO6NQ/US847KNNC2I/AAAAAAAABLY/aCjxyiYEWIg/s1600/2013-02-28-114029.jpg"><img border="0" height="364" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xEMBPjlO6NQ/US847KNNC2I/AAAAAAAABLY/aCjxyiYEWIg/s640/2013-02-28-114029.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Why is it no longer weak to ice like in P3 tho? I mean, that's what penises are weak to, right? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soon after I got my hands on Mara.. ;) I went to my tutoring job, to start the Tower Social Link with Shu:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-44JCOXRtSl8/US87Aj17rwI/AAAAAAAABLs/tLZZFG1CymU/s640/shu.jpg" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He's not that bad tho, he's just a lonely boy... right? And so I decide to spend more time with him...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="362" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_5jtzzcCYZA/US89_SSNGII/AAAAAAAABM8/_8qIj3dVuuU/s640/2013-02-23-225631.jpg" width="640" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="362" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TROJvCXAW0M/US89_aHO4KI/AAAAAAAABM4/biTgAOi00ko/s640/2013-02-23-225641.jpg" width="640" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is just so wrong.... so wrong.... </span></div>
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But seriously, this game makes me feel so dirty all the time. It drops so many hints and some of those Persona designs are just ridiculous... XD</div>
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<img border="0" height="362" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NJb_MX1gDU8/US9AEGNtQ5I/AAAAAAAABNM/jGZFiSuoKg0/s640/2013-02-23-221903.jpg" width="640" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> ...O-okay... oO</span></span></div>
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<img border="0" height="362" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TEGKLV4VCt4/US9AFzA-KBI/AAAAAAAABNU/FN-XL81Kv1w/s640/2013-02-25-143259.jpg" width="640" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">First it just looked like a weird alien was drawn on the stone... then I couldn't unsee the penis any more....</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can't wait to get back to the game... :></span></div>
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Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-68826678193348157512013-02-22T09:47:00.005+01:002013-04-05T03:19:55.509+02:00And more games I want got announced...<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll be piss poor this year...</span></div>
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<script src="http://www.springboardplatform.com/js/overlay"></script><iframe frameborder="0" height="367" id="slcn009_672303" scrolling="no" src="http://cms.springboardplatform.com/embed_iframe/256/video/672303/slcn009/siliconera.com/10" width="550"></iframe><br /></div>
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<script src="http://www.springboardplatform.com/js/overlay"></script><iframe frameborder="0" height="367" id="slcn009_672305" scrolling="no" src="http://cms.springboardplatform.com/embed_iframe/256/video/672305/slcn009/siliconera.com/10" width="550"></iframe></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-60025627397865930782013-02-21T05:12:00.000+01:002013-04-05T03:20:09.868+02:00Playstation 4? Surprisingly, I'm sold.<br />
PlatinumGames, Level-5, Nippon Ichi Software, Gust, Chunsoft, Marvelous AQL, Imageepoch and Atlus amongst others are developing for the PS4. It seems there's no way I won't be getting this system then.<br />
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Persona 5 for PS4. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. :>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-56119592468363194872013-02-15T21:06:00.000+01:002013-04-05T03:21:16.515+02:00Keiji Inafune's otome game... in English!?<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I heard about this before... Keiji Inafune in charge of designing an otome game. I saw the characters (art by the dude who did the art for the Ace Attorney series) and started to desperately hope for a localisation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now it totally took me by surprise when <a href="http://www.aksysgames.com/2013/02/14/a-sweet-valentine-announcement-sweet-fuse-at-your-side/">Aksys announced the game yesterday</a>... just like that. Bam! In your face. Awesome. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*coughs*</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm especially excited since it's not just a straight VN otome game with your usual choices that define which ending you get, no... there's PUZZLES to solve!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And just look at this crazy cast of characters:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oPSIxgHCzhA/UR6NFqv615I/AAAAAAAABJo/vjTsFSlqH44/s640/sweetfuse.jpg" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I totally want to date them all. Especially the glasses dude on the far left that totally reminds me of the crazy priest vampire hunter in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellsing">Hellsing</a>. Bwaha. I also really like the heroine's design. The thought of playing as Inafune's niece ist just... well, I think this game will make me grin a lot. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Good thing it's coming no sooner than summer, hopefully I'll have all those other games finished by then. I'm 8 hours into the game, but I've skipped quite a bit of the story since I still remember it all quite well. But I'm at Kanji's introduction now and since he's my favourite character in the game I'll probably read & listen to a lot more of the dialogue now. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fire Emblem: Awakening also finally got an official EU release date yesterday: April 19th! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Really can't wait for that game... any of you guys in the US playing it already? But you know, the good thing about getting a game a little later is that there's already lots of strategy guides and helpful hints out in the internet when you start playing. I really like to plan a little bit ahead when it comes to strategic games... I usually spent a couple of hours reading various forum discussions about various strategies about gameplay and what to be careful of early in the game. I also hate missing characters/quests/etc. Persona 4 is my personal hell of planning ahead in games. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I actually printed out various lists and tables with information about social links and quests before starting to play thegame. Sometimes I think I should make strategy guide design my profession. I even modified my Ni no Kuni guide book a little to make it more efficent, haha. :></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So that's that. And now back to P4G. </span></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-81462061067897978812013-02-13T18:36:00.001+01:002013-04-05T03:25:57.121+02:00Sometimes.. impatience does pay off!<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Today I got this sudden urge of wanting Persona 4 Golden like RIGHT NOW! So I went to check Ebay.. and actually found some dude from Hamburg who'd been selling the US version, so I mailed him, we agreed to do the whole thing "out-of-ebay" and he said I could come over and get it immediately if I wanted to... and of course I wanted to! </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I was pretty low on cash and paying with your credit card doesn't really work when you're not using Ebay or shopping in a real store. (unless you know someone with a credit card reader / charger, but err yeaaaah.......) Anyway.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9ZDSUqyU0vg/URvOL1Vl0CI/AAAAAAAAA-8/hdtq-DiPr1M/s1600/IMG_9937.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9ZDSUqyU0vg/URvOL1Vl0CI/AAAAAAAAA-8/hdtq-DiPr1M/s320/IMG_9937.JPG" /></span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I called Dad to ask if he could lend me some moneys til next week and guess what he said.... </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"It's on the house." </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Technically I just got P4G ten days early (compared to the EU release) and for free.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">Which means I can spend Valentine's Day with my most favourite game in the world. I also got me my favourite sweets and some of that Lipton Sparkling I'm so addicted to. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">Can't wait for the Weekend! *_*<!--3--></span></span>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-32775874301609237612013-02-12T21:39:00.000+01:002013-04-05T03:25:38.246+02:00A little rant about Ni no Kuni...<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, as I said I'm gonna rant a little.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This will be a little <span style="color: magenta;"><b>spoiler-y</b></span> (I won't spoil the ending or deep plot twists tho), so stay away if you haven't finished the game yet and don't want to know some story related things before having seem them yourself (I won't talk much about anything post-Hamelin, so if you've reached that part you're pretty much save anyway.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I mentioned before, I found the pacing of the storytelling odd at times. It took quite a while to find Esther's father, solve her quest, get to know her and then the story started to move on and implemented her nicely. Shortly afterwards Swayne gets introduced to the story. Barely anything of his introduction is voiced at all and you quickly fight his shadow and after some backtracking he suddenly joins you out of nowhere, while being a total ass and giving the children no real reason why they should have him tag along. He's just annoying for no real reason, while he's actually a nice dude later on and I like his sarcastic comments at the later parts of the games. The game doesn't even bother explaining why he became such an annoying person, I mean, he went out to find his purpose, to become strong and what not.. and then THAT's what he became? WHY? o_O </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn't get it. Even the death of a certain someone in the past didn't explain it to me. And why did he never bother going back to his home before... seriously, just what did that dude do the past 10+ years? XD</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And Marcassin... dude, I was like super hyped to have a Ghibli bishi in my party, then after it took AGES to finally get him in, I realised he is just a weaker Oliver with less spells and crappy familiar compabilities. I was raising familiars for him the whole time and then he never once made it into my party. You can't have Oliver out of your party and leaving Esther out would mean no familiar taming, while leaving Swayne out would mean no stealing from foes, which is especially important in the end game if you intend to do all the alchemy recipes. orz</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And taming familiars is annoying.. all you can do is fight the ones you want over and over again until it finally falls in love with you. Or doesn't. I was lucky so far and got every familiar I wanted to have, but some of them took me quite a while to get. But it feels kinda great to finally get the familiar you want after trying for so long.... orz </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's a selection of my favourite end game 3rd evolution familiars:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Clinketyclank DX / Dualynx / Wispula</span></div>
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<br /><br />Clinketyclank DX & Flash Fry are actually part of a quest, so you have to evolve these 3rd forms at some point if you intend to finish it. I found Clinketyclank already charming the moment I first saw it strolling around Hamelin and caught one right away. I also got Wispula's first form, a Wisp, at The Tombstone Trail next to Hamelin, when I had to go there to advance the story. try getting these two and equip them to Swayne, as he's naturally compatible with them. I found both of them quite well balanced and cute enough to fight through til the end with me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I only got Dualynx because she is pretty, but she's also a good healer. Since she's of the Arcana race, she's not compatible with anyone, but damn, she's a cool cat, so it's good to have her around. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I got a Monolith as soon as I was on my way to Castaway Cove, because I heard he had high defense and he's an Automata, compatible with Swayne. And boy, he's a defensive beast! He's also resistant to physical attacks... sure, he might not deal much damage, but he learns a few nifty tricks and that defense saved my ass a couple of time. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tokotocold & Docotoco were a must for me. As soon as I heard about the adorable Toko family, that looks so charmingly Ghibli, I had to catch 'em all! </span></div>
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I started with trying to get a Toko on a small island to the North of the summer lands, reachable via ship or dragon. I fought quite a couple of them (and significantly raised the levels of my party members, Tokos give a whooping 2000+ exp, and their big brothers, their 2nd evolution Tokotoko gives 9000+) but I had no luck. So as soon as I was able to reach Perdida & Billy Goat's Bluff, I tried my luck on Tokotokos and succeeded! I went through leveling it all the way up to it's max level (6) so it would learn it's last 2nd evo trick and evolved it to a Docotoko after I caught a Tokotocold in the Ivory Tower while I was trying to gain the last bit of experience for my Tokotoko. Docotoko might not have that many useful attack spells, but it's damn cute and only obtainable via evolution. And these two have an amazing magic defense and evasion if you raise Toko and/or Tokotoko to their max level befor evolving. 8)</div>
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Acee / Puss In Boats / Wildwood</div>
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I got Acee for Esther, he's an Aqua and I wanted to get rid of Drongo after I evolved it to it's 3rd form... Drongo was weak and not really that cute, even tho he's a penguin. So I thought about what other familiar would be nice for her and decided to find me a Sparkee at the sea around Castaway Cove... I couldn't really decide which 3rd evo to go for, Acee or Deecee, but went for Acee's cuter face in the end and gosh, haha, he is awesome! He glows! And he's a good all-rounder with pretty cool magic attack tricks. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Puss in Boats is the obvious choice for Oliver. He's got a good defense and good attack, he's not as strong as Griffy, or some of the other catchable familiars, but he's a purrate cat, damn it! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wildwood has awesome defense and is compatible with Esther as well, my favourite team for Esther consisted of Wildwood, Griffy & Acee. You can only catch him in one tiny wood area on an island called No Longer Mine right North of Teeheeti (where the Fairy Ground is!) - you can get there by boat or by dragon later on. I didn't try catching one until I got the dragon, so I'm not too sure which level you should be before attempting to go to the island to catch a Lumberwood. He spawns rarely and it takes a while before he respawns. But if you see him, you can just save the game, fight him and if he doesn't crush on you, just reload. Took me 3 tries until he fell for me. :) If you've got trouble locating him on the island, I've marked his location on this map. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Do you see the tiny little island in the South with a wood on it? You should check it out after you get the dragon. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A familiar you should also consider catching early on is Small Fry, because you'll need his 3rd form:</span></div>
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He's the third <strike>Pokemon</strike> familiar you have to evolve for aformentioned quest, you can find Small Frys all around Old Smokey, so you better try and catch one while you're there for the story anyway and keep him in your party in a spare slot and level him so you have a Flash Fry ready when it's needed. :)</div>
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All in all I don't really want to rant too much about the game. I really loved it in the end and there's much worse games I could be ranting about... like The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, that has the most annoying controls ever (while otherwise being pretty cool so far..), it's actually the first game I'm getting motion-sickness from in years, because it has such an awful camera. Ugh.</div>
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Ahem. Anyway, is there anything that irks you guys about Ni no Kuni or any other games you've been playing lately? </div>
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Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-66223514679307741222013-02-12T18:49:00.000+01:002013-09-19T17:10:34.359+02:00[Review] Ni no Kuni (& Gold Hurly Familiar Give Away)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-j4HqDs9JGU0/URpI-T9pPVI/AAAAAAAAA7U/En8RipNTKTY/s1600/Publisher-Namco-Ni-no-Kuni1.jpg" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-j4HqDs9JGU0/URpI-T9pPVI/AAAAAAAAA7U/En8RipNTKTY/s640/Publisher-Namco-Ni-no-Kuni1.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll try to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible for those who haven't played the game yet... I'll make another post with rants and a few in-depth hints for those that are interested later on. ;><br /><br />I've put a good 75+ hours into the game now (tho I think around 5 hours of those are just me leaving the PS3 on while doing other stuff. ;>) and finished the main story. I still got quite a bit of the post-end content left to finish (monster hunts, quests, catching all familiars just because I can...) and not one minute of it felt like wasted time.<br /><br />I love this game. A lot. But I have to admit that this game has its flaws. Most of them are no big deal and if you're able to overlook them you'll have plenty of fun with this game.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By now everyone who's heard about this game should know what it's about - a boy who gets sucked into a great adventure in another world in order to save his mum. Said boy, Oliver, turns out to be rather great at magic and might just be able to defeat the evil wizard Shadar, also known as the dark djinn who breaks people's hearts. It's your task now to heal all those broken hearts with you magic, make allies, learn awesome spells and save both your world and the other world. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5QvuVq8d5n4/URpJBCSLKUI/AAAAAAAAA7c/i-nx-6BBJdU/s640/ninokunips329.jpg" /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br />It's a great adventure and a rather satisfying story. There were a few (slightly predictable) twists to spice things up and the ending was nice, heartwarming and cute.<br /><br />Yes, this game definitely felt like being sucked into a Ghibli movie, not just because it looks like one. (I wish they would have been in charge of the writing as well tho, parts of the dialogue and pacing of storytelling just felt oddly done to me... but oh well.)<br /><br />My biggest issue with the game is probably how easy it is. I'm not talking about the battles tho, as these can be challenging (or frustrating) even when you set the game's difficulty to "easy" - I actually played the whole game on that difficulty and still found myself in a pinch in a normal fight, from time to time, but then again... I'm not really that great at real-timey stuff that requires a quick reaction (did I mention how amusing it is to watch me play a fps game? orz), the fact that I had just finished FF9 the day before we started playing Ni no Kuni helped a lot tho, as I find the two game's battle systems strangely similar.<br /><br />While you can't move around in FF9, the game also halts the battle while you browse in the sub menus of your spells and such, which is good for people like me who get easily overwhelmed in the heat of a battle, it always helped me calm down a little to have as much time as I want to choose which spell or item to use or which monster I want to attack. While lots of people keep complaining about the battle system, I quite liked it. Especially the boss battles were a loooot of fun! You have to stop and think about what to do next and also quickly react to avoid a huge attack or to heal some damage dealt. You have to switch between characters and familiars to get the best results... I didn't do that for most of the first half of the game, unless a familiar was crushing on me and I had to switch to Esther to catch it. The battles got a whole lot more fun after I started switching between characters more. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />A lot of people also complained about the A.I. of the other party members, but I didn't run into any of the problems people constantly mentioned (mainly being: Esther dying and Esther using too much MP) - just give Esther a good familiar with high attack and decent defense stats... well, okay, I've gotta admit, I gave her the pre-order exclusive Griffy familiar and that made her actually my highest damage dealer throughout the whole game. XD<br /><br />Anyway, back to my big issue about the game being easy...<br /><br />You get to do a lot of stuff in this game, a lot of it is optional too and some of the main story line quests would make for some awesome puzzles, but instead of giving you a puzzle to solve, the game just tells you what to do and you do it.<br /><br />"The door's locked, man. Don't you have a spell for that? Use your Spring Lock spell on the door, Oliver! Oh and look, there's a broken bridge, maybe your Rejuvinate spell can fix it." Thank you, Drippy but couldn't you have let me thought about it on my own? Well, on a few occasions the game does let you figure out which spell to use by yourself... but most of the time you're already being told what to do beforehand. You can even turn on a little star on the map that shows you where to go next all the time. I like a star showing me where to head to next, but I don't like a star spoiling my quest of finding a person that got information about something I need. I mean, yes, please do tell me which part of the world I need to get to next, little star, but you shouldn't tell me that the dude next to the fountain is the guy I need to talk to (this is just a made-up example, don't worry! ;>) ... somehow this game feels like a very long tutorial for almost the first half of the game. But it's one of the most fun tutorials I've played. :><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hAb2X8TBQ6c/URpJBm1HkFI/AAAAAAAAA7k/fD199pHRmVw/s1600/338387.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hAb2X8TBQ6c/URpJBm1HkFI/AAAAAAAAA7k/fD199pHRmVw/s640/338387.jpg" /></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You'll also have to do a lot of running around in this game at first (it gets less later on). But as a Doctor Who fan I don't mind <a href="http://youtu.be/BAi4izfvXo4">an awful lot of running</a> anyway and when you look around these cities you're running through in the game, you can see why the developers would want <strike>to force</strike> you to run around a little more and just indulge yourself in this utterly beautiful game world. The game's textures look really great, some of the cities have such a hand-drawn vibe, it's incredible. The celshaded 3D models of the characters look stunning as well and I really hope this style will be used more often in the future. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm usually really picky when it comes to endings, especially video game endings tend to leave me disappointed. I've at times delayed playing the end of a game for weeks in fear of disappointment... ;_; Ni no Kuni's ending was satisfying as it was and I'm glad I finished the game this quickly, though I would have wished for it to be a little longer.... which is a rare thing for me to say nowadays. Usually I stay away from games that take more than twenty hours to finish. But right now I can see me going back to Ni no Kuni from time to time to finish all the post-end content, catch all the different familiars and evolve all of them to complete the <strike>Pokedex</strike> creature compendium. 8) I'd like to go back to that world every once in a while. (And play some more platoon - that game has got me addicted.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Would be nice if there'd be a second game, maybe set in yet another world, connected to the other two (yes, I love me some nice confusing parallel universe mind fuck!) with a few new characters and an handsome grown up Oliver :>, new familiars, more challenging puzzles and a lot more voice acting! Yes, more voice acting would be nice, because the game had some pretty damn good voice acting. The English dub had hilarious British accents for some characters, the Japanese dub was just as brilliant... well, in those parts of the game that actually had some voice acting, sadly there was very little of them. I didn't mind that there weren't that many Ghibli drawn scenes, the amount seemed just right to me and the celshading animation did look great on it's own, but the lack of voices in most of them did bother me. I would have liked to hear the voices of those characters a lot more, as I think they'd probably have grown a lot more on me if I could have heard them more. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The game's music was rather nice, but it wasn't particulary memorable... it felt right to me while playing the game and I didn't get the urge to listen to other music like some people did. But it also didn't strike me as the best game music ever either. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All in all I had a lot of fun with Ni no Kuni and it did indeed live up to my excitement besides it's flaws. It might not be Level-5 at it's best, but it's still Level-5 and it feels to me like the love child of a Pokemon game and a Ghibli movie. It won't push Atelier Meruru from my personal JRPG number one spot (which Meruru kinda shares with Persona 4, but err, yeah..) but Ni no Kuni will definitely be one of my favourite JRPGs for a long time, if not for all time. :)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now that that's said, it's time for the...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just leave a post, somehow stating that you want the DLC code and if there's more than one person interested, I'll throw the names in a hat and pick a winner next week. :) Note: The DLC only works with US versions of the game and you can only get the DLC from the US PSN store </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(the EU stores got Hurly as a free DLC anyway)</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-60139978047196007482013-02-01T15:04:00.001+01:002013-04-05T03:24:41.798+02:00It finally arrived... *_* (Ni No Kuni Wizard's Edition)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even tho I was already prepared for it, I was still a little disappointed that the Wizard's Companion is so tiny...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> And after playing the hell out of it, I'll also share my thoughts on the game with you~</span><br />
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<br />Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-70972166616103765972013-01-10T12:22:00.003+01:002013-04-05T03:24:04.041+02:00What I'm looking forward to...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While 2012 was a bit lacking for me (even tho they were a few incredibly great games, as mentioned in the post before...), 2013 seems to be more than promising. There's tons of stuff I'm looking forward to and I'd like to share my excitement with you guys. ;></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First of all there's <a href="http://namcobandaigames.com/console/ni-no-kuni-wrath-of-the-white-witch">Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch</a> coming up in a mere <strike>15</strike> 23 days (just as I was writing this, Amazon informed me that the game has been delayed to the first of February... orz) - I've been wanting to play this game ever since the DS version got announced. I was severely disappointed when they announced a localisation for the PS3 version but not the DS one... I had no PS3 then and I didn't think I'd be getting one so soon either. But then I did and after playing through the demo once, I immediately pre-ordered the Limited Edition of Ni No Kuni. It's so fun and so pretty! The story seems to be promising too (but I didn't expect anything else, I mean.. it's Ghibli!) and Level 5's cel shading is marvelous as always... hell yeah. I'm excited for this game!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next up is <a href="http://virtueslastreward.com/">Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Escape</a> (Vita version), which gets released on the same day as Ni No Kuni over here in Germany. I decided to not import the game, when I saw it's only gonna cost 28 Euro over here - a price I'm certainly willing to pay for that game. :D (Usually prices in Germany have the same numbers as in the US, just with a € behind instead of a $ in front of them... so, a 40 USD game suddenly turns into a 40 Euro game which is about $52. How is that fair? ;_;) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In February I'll finally get to play <a href="http://www.atlus.com/p4g/">Persona 4 Golden</a> too! The main reason I got the Vita, as I was never able to finish the game on my shiny pink PS2! The little one deleted my 90% complete save game and ever since I just couldn't bring myself to start from the beginning... after enough time had passed to make me wanna play the game from scratch again, the upgraded Vita version got announced and I decided that if I'm gonna play the game again, then I'm playing that version! So I got me a Vita.. and it has been waiting ever since... waiting for me to finally push the game's cartridge into the game slot and play til the battery runs dry... 8) And that I will do in February!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The game I'm probably most excited about tho, is probably <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier_Ayesha:_The_Alchemist_of_Twilight_Land">Atelier Ayesha</a> - I've been drooling over this game ever since it got announced and after Tecmo-Koei bought Gust I was a little scared that we won't see this game localised or that it would take ages at least. But what's that? A European release, you say? In April? Pre-ordered. WANT NOW!</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.dontstarvegame.com/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don't Starve</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> will also finally see it's official release soon! The Beta has been available for purchase for a while now and it's pretty fun to see the game expand and give you more options to die every few days... 8) It's also 20% off if you buy it now before it's released. :)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there's Deponia 3, <a href="http://www.rabbitsapprentice.de/">The Rabbit's Apprentice</a> (another P&C Adventure game by Daedelic & the awesome <a href="http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/22107">Matthias Kempke</a> of <a href="http://lassiegames.com/stitch/news/">lassiegames</a>!), Pokemon X & Y just got announced for this year too...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And of course <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_Awakening">Fire Emblem: Awakening</a>! Finally a Fire Emblem game that has no perma death! And oh, how I look forward to marrying off all my characters to each other, haha.... 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last but not least there is also the release of <a href="http://www.rockstargames.com/V/">GTA V</a> to look forward to sometime this year... who knows when exactly that is, but it's gonna be awesome!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So many games I'm looking forward to... I wonder if I'll even have the time to play them all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you haven't yet, you can also check out <a href="http://geekouts.blogspot.de/2013/01/what-im-looking-back-on.html">what 2012 games I'm looking back on</a>... ;></span></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-69887070857590866392013-01-10T11:46:00.000+01:002013-05-20T16:23:48.619+02:00What I'm looking back on...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I'm a little late with the list of my ten favourite games of the year 2012, but let's do this anyway:</span><br />
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Meruru has definitely been my absolute favourite this year. It's one of the few games I bought on day one. I've alway been a huge Atelier fan, I played all the games that got an English release so far except for the Arland series. As I didn't have a PS3 before and my brother bought his only last year, I had read a lot of reviews mentioning the differences in gameplay between the three Arland games (at that time only the Japanese version of Meruru was released and it got just announced for an US/EU release) and decided that I would have the most fun with Meruru. It sounded just like my cup of tea - micro management, a little bit of building development, turn based combat, item gathering and alchemy... no timed quests! The stories of the first two games were simple enough to catch up on via youtube, so the returning character's had also already grown on me when I finally got to play Meruru. </span><br />
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I loved every bit of it. The cute & fun characters, especially Meruru grew on me a lot. She was a fun heroine. She had a nice personality, was strong willed and not completely oblivious to the most obvious things (this is something a lot of the heroes in Japanese games / anime suffer from... and so annoying.) The gameplay was awesome. There were a few things I would have wished to be more comfortable when browsing through the alchemy menus, but all in all this was one of the most enjoyable games I ever played. I can't decide if I even prefer it over Persona 4 - I'll decide about that as soon as I spent some time with Golden in February when it finally gets released over here. :)</span><br />
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Anyway. If you own a PS3 and like Japanese RPGs and don't mind a little cuteness (and really, I get easily annoyed by the Japanese kind of cute - and this was absolutely bearable.. I even found it very much adorable.) then please play this game. </span><br />
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Oh yes. There's also the fact that Rufus is voiced by Takehito Koyasu in the Japanese dub. THE VOICE! (If you don't know who he is, google him and you'll see that he's voiced so many main character in so many major anime series and games... it's insane. But I can see why everyone would like to hire him as a VA. He's just awesome. ;>)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>02.) <a href="http://www.deponia.de/en/">Deponia</a> (PC)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since Point & Click Adventures have been my most favourite passion ever since I started PC gaming back in the year 99... so maybe you can imagine how hyped I was about the fact that the genre suddenly revived a few years ago, with Telltale, Daedelic and Wadjeteyegames pushing the genre a lot... oh, what utter bliss!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deponia was one title I especially enjoyed last year. It was quirky and fun, had characters that were likeable.. and if not, they were interesting enough to keep you entertained anyway. 8) Rufus is one of the most fun "heroes" I've seen in a game. The story was so fun and I just couldn't stop playing after I started (or we, as I play all P&C Adventures together with J ;>) and gosh, was I disappointed when it suddenly just ended with no real conclusion to the story... I instantly pre-ordered the 2nd of the triology.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>03.) <a href="http://www.deponia.de/en/">Chaos on Deponia</a> (PC)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And boy, did I not regret that. Deponia 2 or Chaos on Deponia is even better than Deponia. More challenging puzzles, more great humour, more awesome characters and the best: PLATYPUS! Everywhere! *__*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now I can't wait to play the third and final installment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can just recommend these two games to anyone who enjoys Point & Click Adventures. Even if the English translation is a bit... well, some translations are a bit too literal. At least in the first game - I hope they fixed that for Chaos. :)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Currently you can get the first one (for Steam) pretty cheap in the new <a href="http://www.indiegala.com/">Indie Gala Bundle</a>! (</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Along with other great games like Magicka & Trine!)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>04.) <a href="http://us.playstation.com/games-and-media/games/journey-ps3.html">Journey</a> (PS3)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This beautiful, shiny little gem of a game. I've had so much trouble explaining this game to my friends... because when you tell them: "It's a game where you run through a beautiful desert to reach a mountain!" it doesn't really sound that exciting. 8)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This "game" is about atmosphere and aesthetics. At least to me it is. Each chapter adds another layer of gameplay, gives you some vague story elements that you have to interpret yourself and bathes you in it's beautiful landscape. The music always suits the current scenery and adds so much atmosphere to the chapters... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Seriously. If you own a PS3, you have to own this game as well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>05.) <a href="http://botanicula.net/">Botanicula</a> (PC)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By far the cutest Point & Click Adventure ever. By the same guys who made Machinarum, this relaxing short adventure is definitely something every P&C ADV enthusiast should have played. It's adorable and fun. Takes around 5 hours to finish and leaves you with a feeling of happiness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The perfect game for a rainy weekend evening! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>06.) <a href="http://www.ftlgame.com/">FTL: Faster Than Light</a> (PC)</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or: Frustration - The Game. 8) Don't get me wrong, I love this game. Yet I hate it too. :> It's easily one of the most frustrating games ever. One wrong move and you're dead. And at the beginning. It's somewhat of a turn-based spaceship RTS simulation with rouguelike and RPG elements....? It's easier to play than this sounds tho. 8)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll explain that in a full review one of these days... but it's definitely one of my most played games of 2012. It's addicting. One of these games that makes you think: "Just one more turn.. one more... then I'll be off to bed!" and suddenly you realise it's 4 in the morning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">07.) </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pokemonconquest.com/">Pokemon Conquest</a> (NDS)</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I haven't finished this game yet.. I actually haven't touched it since a couple of months, but it's one of the game I want to get back to and finish this year. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was so excited when it first got announced and even more so when the news got out that it would be localised! When I finally got my hands on it I was totally hooked. It's fun, the battles do not last as long as in most other SRPGs (which always bothers me a little tbh), some are easy, some more challenging.. the game got a got balance and it's so much fun to find the "Perfect Link" for your warlords.. and then conquer all of the wonderful Pokemon world... 8)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes, I definitely need to get back to this game soon. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>08.) <a href="http://www.torchlight2game.com/">Torchlight II</a> (PC)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Please note, that in this game, you do not have to be online to be able to play. And even if you play online and disconnect, YOU CAN JUST CONTINUE TO PLAY ANYWAY! :></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm not that far into the game, to be honest, since I'm playing online with a friend and it's hard to find times where both of us have a couple of hours to play, but it's fun. There's tons of loot. Tons of dungeons. Tons of enemies. Tons of difficulties. Tons of skills. This game will keep you busy for hours... but it also gets a little repetitive like all games of this genre. Three hours per week are enough for me, so it might take me quite a while to finish this game. XD</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>09.) <a href="http://nyu-media.com/cherry-tree-high-comedy-club/">Cherry Tree High Comedy Club</a> (PC)</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A fun little stat raiser / friendship sim.... not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely mine, since I am so into stat raising sims... 8)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And this is not your usual raise your stats to impress a girl/guy thing like Tokimemo, but instead you play a fun girl who is into comedy and wants to have her own comedy club in school. But for that she needs to recruit people, because you need at least three members to start a club! So you raise your knowledge in various "repertoirs" so you can talk about stuff that your recruits like. If you talk about stuff they like, they'll like you more and more and finally join your club. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story is cute and fun, the game isn't too lengthy and stats carry over if you start a new game after finishing once. I liked the game enough to finish it twice. :)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>10.) <a href="http://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-3DS/Nintendo-presents-New-Style-Boutique-653532.html">New Style Boutique</a> / <a href="http://stylesavvy.nintendo.com/">Style Savvy: Trendsetters</a> (3DS)</b></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've gotta admit, I didn't play this game until this year and aren't that far in yet, but since it got released in 2012 and all... ;> It's just as addicting as the first one was and does a lot of things better! More clothes! More characters! BOYS! ...I wish this game had some sort of dating element too, haha... but I'm already pleased with being a great fashion store owner that gets to spend to personal time with her clients in the cafe or park from time to time. 8)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next up: <a href="http://geekouts.blogspot.de/2013/01/what-im-looking-forward-to.html">What I'm looking forward to...</a></span>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-79400247129016406762012-12-14T13:59:00.001+01:002013-04-05T03:22:15.260+02:00Coming Soon...I've been a little absent from the internet lately, busy with real life stuff and I've got to admit, mostly I was using all my free time to catch up on a few games I haven't been able to play before.<br />
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But with the Christmas holidays coming up I might even be able to review some of the games I've been playing lately. This list consists mostly of:<br />
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Puzzle Agent 1 & 2<br />
Chaos on Deponia<br />
Home<br />
(all of these were played together with J, as usual)<br />
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1931: Scheherazade<br />
Dandelion<br />
Don't Starve<br />
FTL: Faster Than Light<br />
Portal 2<br />
King's Bounty: Crossworlds<br />
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Saturday I'll start playing GTA IV with J on my PS3 - we actually wanted to play it last weekend on my PC, but found out it got ridiculous CPU needs that my computer sadly can't fulfill (which results in lots of lag while driving - unbearable.). Luckily I got a friend with the PS3 version and since I recently bought a PS3 (which is actually a Birthday-/Christmas present for me and the little one (his bday is 4 days before, mine 10 days after Christmas, so that works out well for big presents.. :>))<br />
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Anyway. Expect some updates from my side the next couple weeks and maybe there might even finally be some info I can share on my own game as well. :)<br />
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In any case: Awesome holidays and everything to all of you for now! <3 p="p"><!--3--><!--3--></3>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-16500159067771291442012-09-23T21:09:00.000+02:002012-09-23T21:10:30.887+02:00[Let's Talk] Multiplayer Games<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Recently I've been trying lots of turn based multiplayer games, trying to find a few ones I can play with J when we don't have time to meet up and fulfill our point & click adventure urges. I've stumbled upon two games I found very worth mentioning:</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Fortune Winds - Ancient Trader</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Number of players: 1-4</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Usual time for one game: 40-60 minutes</span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Available for: PC / Mac / iOS</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ancient Trader is a very beautiful game. But besides that it's also very fun for quick inbetween gaming session. You start with choosing your name, avatar and a map to play on. And those maps are so pretty. *_* </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the beginning of each round the whole map besides a few spaces around your ship are covered with clouds, more and more gets slowly uncovered as you move around or pick up map pieces. You can enter ports, to buy resources for preferably cheap prices and sell them at other ports for a higher price - that's your main income of money. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can also upgrade various aspects of your ship, like its speed or weapon prowess. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You've got three types of weapons to choose from in the rock-paper-scissor type turn-based battles. Most of these merely depend on luck tho and can get a little frustrating from time to time. If you lose, you lose some gold or resources - if you win, you get some. ;></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To win the game you have to get the three artifacts located at various ports, find the leviathan and beat it. (There might be other winning conditions for other maps, I'm not too sure about that right now. ;>)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It feels a lot like a board game and that's what I like about it. It's not a game you'll spend hours with in one go, since it gets a little boring quickly. But it's certainly lots of fun for a round with friends from time to time. :)</span><br />
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<img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JOVVr9SoX6I/UF8i9HPVtTI/AAAAAAAAA2Q/-1n5IgBBOow/s200/Fortune-Winds-1.jpg" /><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sEsP0Q0GOZ0/UF8i-zmvNzI/AAAAAAAAA2Y/zWFJRLwsQlA/s200/Fortune-Winds-2.jpg" /><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xqq7Ein3qVk/UF8jABEBXTI/AAAAAAAAA2g/vtMqp7J3A84/s200/Fortune-Winds-3.jpg" /> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Greed Corp</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Number of players: 1-4</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Usual time for one game: 30-60 minutes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Available for: PC / Xbox360 / PS3 / iOS</span>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='640' height='480' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/LDq-9t9VEeg?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Greed Corp you take charge of a race of robots, have to manage resources & units and fight off all of your opponents to win the game. Just as Ancient Trader, it's perfect for a quick round with friends. It isn't overly complicated to get in to, playing the tutorial takes less than an hour and I'd definitely recommend doing that before jumping in to the game. The story mode is also quite cute, but just as with Ancient Trader, the game can get boring after a while. Tho it took me longer to get bored with this one. :></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the start of each turn you can move your robots freely around the spaces you own on the map of floating islands and to one adjacent space, to claim it as your own. If it's occupied by other robots who aren't on your team, you'll have to fight them. If you win the battles or not is decided by your number of units, if it's higher than your enemy's, you win. If it's not, you get killed. Simple as that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To build units, you have to first build an amory, besides that you can also build cannons (and bullets for it), which can shoot at enemies further away, without taking any damage yourself. And transporters which you can use to send your units to spaces that aren't connected to other spaces on the map and therefore unreachable otherwise. </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You'll also need to build harvesters, which will provide you with income. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there's a twist to this:</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Each time when it's your turn, your harvesters stomp down the space they're build on and the surrounding spaces one level. When it's down to zero, the spaces crumble and fall down - taking any units placed there down with them as well. It's always a good idea to take over other player's harvesters (if you can) and have them all fall down and die, hurrdurr. :></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Greed Corp also feels a lot like a board game and it's pretty fun when playing against friends, but not very challenging in the story mode. Most of the time eat least. :></span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wouldn't exactly recommend either of these games to people who would only play them alone, as both of them get really repetive after a while. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These really are best played when you just want about half an hour to get your head off of things and have some quick fun with friends. :)</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HzyL34v7eME/UF9PsQwk5hI/AAAAAAAAA3A/nIzxkoQ0osE/s1600/Greed-Corp-0.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HzyL34v7eME/UF9PsQwk5hI/AAAAAAAAA3A/nIzxkoQ0osE/s640/Greed-Corp-0.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vww77kR0370/UF9PuKbjxxI/AAAAAAAAA3I/XEbwoUr_ozg/s200/Greed-Corp-1.jpg" /><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eNe12TysPXI/UF9PvmMMIWI/AAAAAAAAA3M/hCZ9iw9WxKo/s200/Greed-Corp-2.jpg" /><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dhwk7Ylrm3c/UF9PwSpAc2I/AAAAAAAAA3Y/uMO8T6v1c_I/s200/Greed-Corp-3.jpg" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Besides those two, I've also been playing lots of Torchlight II, which is incredibly fun and gosh, some of those monsters have some rather creepy designs, which clash a lot with the colourful, bright and cute surroundings (I even saw a little froggie jumping around on one of the maps, so cute *_*), but in a good way. Yes, so far I'm really enjoying the game. I had no chance to try the co-op mode yet tho, sadly... but I'll hopefully get to that soon. :)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So... do you guys have any great multiplayer / co-op games you could recommend? :D</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-110859799788623372012-09-07T01:51:00.000+02:002012-09-07T01:51:00.857+02:00So... Elementary.<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I just saw the pilot episode of the upcoming CBS show </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2191671/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Elementary</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and hell, I liked it. But I won't spoil the fun for you, so here's just my first impressions on the characters and overall feel of the show:</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I've been really sick of the whole <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1475582/">Sherlock</a> vs </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Elementary </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">debate from the moment the new CBS show got announced. It seems just as stupid to me as comparing BBC's Sherlock with the Hollywood </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0988045/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sherlock Holmes movies</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Elementary </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">got announced, I was just damn excited about it. I just love me a good detective story and interesting characters. And anything based on the stories & characters by </span><a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Arthur Conan Doyle</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> can't be that bad. Right? Right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Elementary's pilot episode was at least very promising.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock is sexy, charming and a little rugged, which reminds me of Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock. But it seems like Miller's interpretation is also calculating and manipulating in ways we've seen from Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock. But he adds enough of his own to not just be a mere fusion of the two. All in all I like his Sherlock just as much as the other two so far. :></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And Watson, oh Dr. Joan Watson. I'm biased here. I really love Lucy Liu. I love her Watson. And I honestly don't really care if Watson's a man or a woman. As long as the chemistry is right - and so far it seems promising as well. I'm pretty sure at some point they will direct it into a sexual / romantic direction, well, maybe, but I wouldn't mind that either as long as it's done right. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The case was also interesting, but the focus clearly was on character interaction - which makes sense for the pilot episode, but I hope they'll focus more on the cases and the whole process of solving them in the next few episodes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">October's certainly gonna be awesome with Elementary, the new season of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1439629/">Community</a> and the releases of <a href="http://www.atlus.com/p4g/index.html">Persona 4 Golden</a> & <a href="http://www.deponia.de/en/">Deponia 2</a>. Can't wait. And <a href="http://www.torchlight2game.com/">Torchlight II</a>'s release is merely two weeks away as well, yay. <3 font="font"></3></span>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-22750048244470221952012-08-09T18:49:00.000+02:002012-08-09T18:49:44.894+02:00Sound Shapes<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Djj-gs27CSo/UCPYIu9QDaI/AAAAAAAAA00/c_3KEpri8Lc/s640/2012-08-09-171110.jpg" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm usually staying away from platformers, as I really, really suck at them. But add some creative options, like making your own levels and composing music at the same time - oh well, I can't help but get curious...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And since the Vita hasn't seen much love and since I like to support indie developers.. and the game is 20% off for PS+ users, I just couldn't resist and pre-ordered it last week. 8) (It's also for both Vita & PS3, no matter which version you buy, you'll get the other as well.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So on Tuesday the game was finally available to download and since then I've been spending quite a bit of time with it. And not just me, the little one is rather fond of it as well - which is just awesome, since he can go and do all the jumping and running to unlock more items and sounds, so I can fiddle around even more with the level creator.. ;></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But admittingly, the stages aren't actually that hard (at least not all the time) and there's no game over, you just respawn at your last checkpoint and merely have to collect the coins you gathered after the checkpoint again - luckily you can use the checkpoints again after picking up coins, so you won't lose them any more after dying. So all in all I am actually having a lot of fun with the platforming as well - which is mainly due to the awesome artwork and music in this little gem. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; text-align: center;"> A few of the different stages</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KENQ3k0E0bs/UCPYFR1SqzI/AAAAAAAAA0c/pAV953gsiKA/s1600/2012-08-09-165652.jpg" style="text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="117" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KENQ3k0E0bs/UCPYFR1SqzI/AAAAAAAAA0c/pAV953gsiKA/s200/2012-08-09-165652.jpg" width="209" /></a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UKNEOB70qMQ/UCPYGEx8qfI/AAAAAAAAA0g/0EOdcyaYx-M/s1600/2012-08-09-165720.jpg"><img border="0" height="117" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UKNEOB70qMQ/UCPYGEx8qfI/AAAAAAAAA0g/0EOdcyaYx-M/s200/2012-08-09-165720.jpg" width="209" /></a></span><img border="0" height="117" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V5rZ1FKe7y4/UCPYH-EGeQI/AAAAAAAAA0w/Vs0JkRwx6Cw/s200/2012-08-09-171018.jpg" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" width="209" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1Zzyh0bkUvI/UCPYHhVPwzI/AAAAAAAAA0s/6jALDtQ4xpA/s1600/2012-08-09-170938.jpg" style="text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="364" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1Zzyh0bkUvI/UCPYHhVPwzI/AAAAAAAAA0s/6jALDtQ4xpA/s640/2012-08-09-170938.jpg" width="633" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jH8okUxBAYo/UCPYJLBQVWI/AAAAAAAAA1A/h7deWlqjlyY/s1600/2012-08-09-171134.jpg"><img border="0" height="117" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jH8okUxBAYo/UCPYJLBQVWI/AAAAAAAAA1A/h7deWlqjlyY/s200/2012-08-09-171134.jpg" width="209" /></a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kifJkGc7C-M/UCPYJpLasUI/AAAAAAAAA1M/bMzlETPvc6Y/s1600/2012-08-09-171152.jpg"><img border="0" height="117" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kifJkGc7C-M/UCPYJpLasUI/AAAAAAAAA1M/bMzlETPvc6Y/s200/2012-08-09-171152.jpg" width="209" /></a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J4qTypM1nU4/UCPYLljkyTI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/8h0dXsTx4Dw/s1600/2012-08-09-171629.jpg"><img border="0" height="117" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J4qTypM1nU4/UCPYLljkyTI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/8h0dXsTx4Dw/s200/2012-08-09-171629.jpg" width="209" /></a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">The level creation mode</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most of the levels feel more like an artsy interactive music video than just a platformer, especially Beck's "Cities" was a lot of fun to play through since everything was so perfectly synched to the song's rythmn and even after ten minutes</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(I died A LOT ;>)</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I didn't get bored of the song.. :)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CeEiWGwuj8g" width="560"></iframe></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'd recommend this to anyone who likes artsy stuff, good music and doesn't hate platformers with a passion.. the 20% discount for PS+ still lasts til Tuesday as well! :)</span></div>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-5055139814637640542012-06-10T14:52:00.004+02:002013-04-08T21:22:19.670+02:00There will be updates<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soon.. ish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Done with my first play through <b>Atelier Meruru</b> - it's fucking adorable and SO addicting. It's good I didn't play the other games, since Meruru balances the micro-management extremely well with almost no parts where I got frustrated or annoyed (except for boss battles - but that's how it should be.), I actually liked the game so much, that I would have instantly started a New Game+ after I finished the game with the Good Ending (Took me around 50 hours in total). Now I want to get all of the endings. And fully develop the kingdom! And synthesize EVERYTHING with alchemy!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">... too bad my Playstation 3 times are depending on my brother's whims. And now that he moved out of our mum's place I can't even sneakily occupy his PS3 while he's out when I'm visiting mum. Damn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I can have it next week, he promised. ;></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, while I've got no PS3 around I'm using the time to (finally) finish <b>Hexyz Force</b>, I'm on the last chapter of Cecilia's story and should be done in a few days. (I always play before going to bed and almost always fall asleep within 30 minutes, so I'm not making that much progress per day.. XD) The game is more fun than I expected (after reading a few negative reviews), but it's not really anything special. Pretty much standard RPG formula, stereotypical anime-fantasy characters and nothing too deep gameplay and story-wise. But still fun. I especially love that you can fast-forward the battles, that way I actually don't mind grinding a little more. I wish every game would have this feature.. :> (The only other game I remember playing that allowed to fast forward battles was Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 4..)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I also finally got to buy the current <a href="http://www.humblebundle.com/">Humble Indie Bundle</a> - anyone who doesn't own these games, well, actually, even if you own them already: <b>GET THIS BUNDLE!</b> It's way too awesome to pass up on. You can gift it to someone else as well and make them happy! (I did that with the Botanicula-Bundle, birthday present for my mum <3) <b>Bastion</b> alone makes this bundle worth the money already.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sooo then my bestie and I started playing <b>Lone Survivor</b> yesterday night and <b>OMG, IT'S SUCH A FUCKING SCARY GAME!</b> ...we kinda gave up after 45 minutes. <b>SO CREEPY</b>. Geez... but still, very, very awesome. I totally need to find someone who's not as easily scared as I am to play the game while I just sit next to them and ogle at the game's awesomeness. 8) Same goes for <b>Watch Dogs</b>, definitely my highlight of this year's otherwise extremely disappointing E3. I can't watch this trailer often enough:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Watch it on full screen in HD!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I'm definitely too slow/dumb/inaccurate for the action game play sequences... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Besides my avid gaming sessions I spent most of the past weeks working on my own game and it's slowly taking some form.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At least I've finally decided on a title for it and I hopefully will be able to officially announce the game soon. And show off some of the shit we made. Yey. :></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll also try and at least write up a Meruru review some time next week. :)</span></div>
Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-886546111173352802012-05-19T19:07:00.002+02:002012-05-19T19:08:31.348+02:00Ciel no Surge Patch 1.3 released<a href="http://social.gust.co.jp/pc/support/ciel/index_p11.htm">http://social.gust.co.jp/pc/support/ciel/index_p11.htm</a>
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Seems like most of the major bugs have been fixed now. :)Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-32080021568690663852012-05-14T17:11:00.002+02:002013-05-20T22:13:44.735+02:00[review] Ciel no Surge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">...or "Menu Navigation - The Game".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Genre: 7D Game</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Developer: Gust</span></div>
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<a href="http://social.gust.co.jp/pc/ciel/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Official Website</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, my Limited Edition arrived a week ago and I've had enough time to fiddle around with the game and drool over the lovely art and music. And then this happened:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Credits? Wait a sec... wtf? I didn't even spend more than 10 hours on the game, at least actively. Since most of the time you won't have anything to do besides watching your fairies or Sharls.. or Charls, since Gust seems to have a serious problem with consistency, flutter around repairing Ion's memories.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But oh well, let's start right from the beginning:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ion has lost her memory and after seeing some fancy opening cutscenes accompanied by some awesome music you end up in her room. Or something like that. The main story revolves around the world Ion lives in, Rashura, which is nearing it's end, since the sun has been expanding and is threatening to destroy the planet. In her world an item called "Cernotron" exists, which enables people to convert thoughts to energy, which makes their lifes comfy, but won't help with the sun threat at all.. so people started building these floating cities called "Kolons" which are protected from the sun (makes sense, the nearer you get to the sun, the less it's a threat, right? RIGHT!?) since they have some sort of technology that prevents the sun damaging the cities and whatnot. I actually didn't get too much of the story since I skipped the dialogues most of the time and even if I hadn't, I wouldn't have gotten too much with my limited Japanese knowledge.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What I realised tho, is that this game is weird.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And pretty boring.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But so, so beautiful....</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5Y-E1tZtozA/T7EaCgr6TwI/AAAAAAAAAyE/DtfuI8gNMpk/s1600/2012-05-07-175634.jpg" style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><img border="0" height="114" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5Y-E1tZtozA/T7EaCgr6TwI/AAAAAAAAAyE/DtfuI8gNMpk/s200/2012-05-07-175634.jpg" width="200" /></a> <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_E6c8i2dK9Q/T7EYh9RUQ8I/AAAAAAAAAxY/dexueyLl_9g/s1600/2012-05-06-153138.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_E6c8i2dK9Q/T7EYh9RUQ8I/AAAAAAAAAxY/dexueyLl_9g/s200/2012-05-06-153138.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jLNpPRimBrs/T7EYjR40AAI/AAAAAAAAAxo/2sbTKmGBXf8/s1600/2012-05-06-153156.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jLNpPRimBrs/T7EYjR40AAI/AAAAAAAAAxo/2sbTKmGBXf8/s200/2012-05-06-153156.jpg" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, after the introduction you can talk to Ion in her room, you can also touch her in different ways, but that doesn't have much effect besides Ion blushing or saying it tickles, or getting mad at you if you touch her inappropriately. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Besides that you can ask Ion to craft items for you, either food or clothes or random stuff that I have no idea what it's good for except for creating other stuff with it. Most items were locked and stayed locked while I played through the story, so I'm not really sure how to unlock them. When you're able to find and item that Ion is actually able to make, she will get at it right away and you can watch her sitting at the table and doing stuff that doesn't exactly look like she's creating the item you asked her for. But oh well..</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2uw2KbDzXY/T7EYlQ7GCfI/AAAAAAAAAx8/d1Mro4sk49o/s1600/2012-05-07-152137.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2uw2KbDzXY/T7EYlQ7GCfI/AAAAAAAAAx8/d1Mro4sk49o/s200/2012-05-07-152137.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pUC371jRueo/T7EYfadzxOI/AAAAAAAAAxM/99xtJEfih6E/s1600/2012-05-04-130004.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pUC371jRueo/T7EYfadzxOI/AAAAAAAAAxM/99xtJEfih6E/s200/2012-05-04-130004.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ymZpxrqFcyQ/T7EYenHvLaI/AAAAAAAAAxE/b6diy8mvHvE/s1600/2012-05-03-191916.jpg"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ymZpxrqFcyQ/T7EYenHvLaI/AAAAAAAAAxE/b6diy8mvHvE/s200/2012-05-03-191916.jpg" /></a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's about all you do when you are in Ion's room. Talk to her, touch her inappropriately and then watch her do stuff like sewing, drawing, cooking, eating, sleeping.. and yes, it is as boring as it sounds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course Ion is awfully cute, so it's not all that bad watching her do all this boring stuff, it's cute to hear her sing a song suddenly while she's drawing a picture... but why the hell does she never show the pictures she drew? :(</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And this is basically all you'll be doing besides being a creepy stalker...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Besides Ion's room you can also go out on a date with her - I never tried that, because I never found the option, but actually... I don't think it's such a huge loss. ^^; This game does not really feel like a dating game, tho it is so similar to Love Plus, but romancing Ion is definitely not the game's main goal.. I'm not even sure if you can get romantically involved with her at all, I'd be more than glad if you can't tho, as I don't really feel like it would add anything to the game.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well then, the other way to get out of Ion's room is entering her mind world, there you can use the barcode scanning feature, which makes fairies appear, which you can then buy for a fee, the in-game currency is called HymP (Hymn Points or something) and you gain more by sending you fairis off to work. Their work consists of flying around at the "Broken Points" and fix everything with their magic, wohoo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Basically each fairy has an element (Water, Wind, Earth and Metal) and each Broken Point needs a certain number of elements. It starts off with as little as 20 Water, 20 Wind and goes up to 160 of each element later on. So, when you select an BP, you get to a screen where you can choose one of your fairies, next a list of available fairies from other users pops up and you get to choose one again and both of them go off to the BP and start infusing it with their magic. The other user's fairies are usually your main source of magic, since you won't be able to afford much upgrading or high level fairies early on.. and later on. I wonder how those people leveled their fairies so high, since there isn't really that many Broken Points you can repair... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Repairing can take quite some time, your usual lvl 1 fairies produce around 3-7 of their element in 5 minutes, if you are lucky you find a barcode that will produce a lvl 1 fairy who'll produce 10-15 every 5 minutes. But it doesn't matter anyway since most of the time you can just rely on other user's fairies. I've found a 100+ magic fairy almost every time when I had to choose another user's fairy to help my fairy repair something... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When you are done with the repair, you either unlock a new map with more Broken Points or an event scene. There's 16 (I think? Could have been 17 as well) of those, each of them 5-20 minutes long, telling the story of how Ion met these 3 children and then there's some sort of uprising against the government (or something) and tsundere girl is all jealous of Ion, until they suddenly make up and then Ion starts singing and giant water lilies start blooming everywhere and then the credits roll...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I actually have no idea what exactly happened in Ion's past and I've gotta say I've got no real intention of ever finding out. This game felt like Love Plus without the cool parts x (Insert Random Facebook Game) x Twitter and that's just weird and pretty boring. Most of the time you are just navigating through the awfully vast menus with their 3 billion sub menus and loading times, between switching menus, are awfully slow, probably since everything is loaded from the Gust server...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Conclusion:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As beautiful the art direction and the music of the game is, this game is a lot less than I hoped it would be and the only thing I got excited about when playing it was the sudden appearance of a friend (?) of Ion's who came over one day:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For some reason I only took screenshots of her boobs... 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, I was curious about this game and I had some fun playing it, but I'm not too much into social networking and watching Ion sleep is about as exciting as watching anyone else sleep, I was hoping for far more micro-managing and collectables, I was hoping you could spend a lot more time with training your fairies and I was hoping for far more design options for them.. 5 hairstyles? Disappointing. And two of them are only available if you buy them when upgrading your fairies. :(</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, I'll probably also get the second chapter, since it's gonna be free, but I guess that's it then for me and the game. But at least that super shiny Vita sticker looks awesome and so it was definitely worth importing the game.... 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next up:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finishing Hexys Force, the second Reproduction & Portal 2.</span></div>
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Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656749725325746240.post-55704615849948268202012-04-27T20:02:00.000+02:002012-04-27T20:02:38.482+02:00The awesome adventures of J & M! (part one)<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Adventure games have always been a passion of mine. Back in the day, when computers were still a mystery to me, the only thing I'd touch one for were adventure games.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Games like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Laura Bow, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle and the likes were my favourite games to play after school. I'd be running over to J's place and we'd sit in front of her mother's computer for hours, trying to find a way to save Laura Bow from the evil killer and solve the crime, trying to have Indy sell leather jackets to about anyone he'd meet. Trying to save Elaine from the evil clutches of LeChuck... oh, those were the days.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But some day 3D took over and the games lost their spark. But the past couple of years the 2D point & click adventure genre had a huge come back, so J and I got back together for the sake of the good old times and our greatest (or most tiring) adventure began.... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">J is one of my besties. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She is like the best partner to have around when playing adventure games. At least to me. We like totally complement each other, since we both quickly know what needs to be done, but find the most different ways to do it. So we rarely get stuck, since one of us will have another great (or most stupid) idea on how to achieve what we're trying to do. We brainstorm our way through them adventure games like it's a total piece of cake. Well, most of the time. ;></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But then again, we've been doing this stuff for at least 13 years now, so it's no wonder we work that well together. :></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, we haven't been able to game together for some years, since I was living in another city, she was busy with university stuff and I was busy with raising a child. But that's okay. Now we've got this huge backlog of games we are planning to finish off, a lot of stuff to look forward to. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Three weeks ago we started with "<b><a href="http://www.deponia.de/en/">Deponia</a>"</b>, a new German point & click adventure by Daedelic - coincidentally a friend of ours is working for them, doing character animation, design and background art, which was the reason I started playing Daedelic games in the first place (because, come one, it's awesome to play games made by people you've personally known for years! <3) and while "<b><a href="http://www.the-whispered-world.com/">The Whispered World</a>"</b> (here's the link to the <a href="http://www.the-whispered-world.de/">German website</a> as well) was a bit disappointing (mainly because the German dub wasn't that great - I shall try this in English again one day, never finished the German version) Deponia was pretty awesome all the way. The protagonist was amusing and likeable (sort of, since he's kind of a dick, but in a very likeable way.. I mean, seriously, I can't help but love characters who come up with their own theme song and sing/hum it whenever they can... XD), the story was interesting, the dub was pretty well done, the music was fun and awesome, and the puzzles were neither too easy nor too hard. I won't go into detail on the story, as I believe experiencing adventure games while knowing as little as possible about them before is the best way to play them! And Deponia is supposed to be released in English soon...ish. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who likes cartoons & adventure games!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was a very fun ride for us and the start of the incredible relapse of our obsessive adventure game addiction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Sorry, German only, no English trailer has been released yet ;__;)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">BEWARE OF SPOILERS - Intermezzo song(s) of the German version.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">(Spoilers are hidden in the lyrics, so you are fine if you have no idea about German! ;>)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">"Hussa, es geht ums Prinzip!" XD</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After we played through that in one night, we were craving for more.... Much more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So we ended up at my place the next weekend again, this time playing "<b><a href="http://edna.daedalic.de/index.php?lang=en">Edna & Harvey - The Breakout</a>"</b> ("Edna bricht aus", for the German people) and at around 10 in the morning we were done with that as well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">English "Edna & Harvey - The Breakout" trailer</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there was still the second Harvey game left, so we met again last weekend to play that - this time another character, called Lilli, was the story's protagonist. While Edna was brave, bold and adventurous, Lilly is doing everything according to the rules, never daring to do anything bad. But in the end Harvey 2 is even bloodier, meaner and has an even darker humor than Harvey 1. We liked it, a lot. 8) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We had a really good time with Harvey 2 and played til 8 in the morning again. But since that wasn't enough (again) and we didn't <i>really</i> have other plans for the weekend (*coughs*) we started browsing through my steam library and continued on with "<b><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/80300/">Puzzle Bots</a></b>", a cute, short and quirky game about little robots trying to save their inventors. We were done with that in not even 2 hours, so we went on to "<b><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/65080/">Kaptain Brawe</a></b>" - later on that day (it was Saturday) some other friends of ours came over and since Kaptain Brawe is unvoiced, we decided to put it on hold and play the "<b><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/32460">Monkey Island 2</a>"</b> HD remake - since each of us had played the first one sooo many times and I had just completed it together with my son a couple of weeks ago, we decided to skip that and play 2 instead. Around 10 hours, dozens of beers and a bursting ashtray later we were almost done with that as well... it was Sunday morning around 10, we had spent around 38 hours on playing point & click adventures and we were half dead. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gosh, that was one of the most awesome weekends I had lately. 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next on our to play list:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.humblebundle.com/"><b>Botanicula</b></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/205840"><b>Yesterday</b></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/58560"><b>Runaway - A Twist Of Fate</b></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And I'm especially excited about the soon to be released (June, in Germany) The Dark Eye (Pen & Paper) inspired "<a href="http://www.satinavs-ketten.de/?lang_new=en" style="font-weight: bold;">Chains of Satinav</a>", once again a new game devoloped by Daedelic. I also can't wait for next Deponia game which is set for a Fall release... 8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Inbetween all the gaming fests I've been also working on my own game and should soon be able to show some of the progress we made. :) Our artist is awesome, let me tell you!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And now I'm off to get drunk with my mum, since today's her birthday! <3</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(I shall also post a few reviews soon(ish), as I should be done with some of the games I started to play in a bit.... unless I start playing a ton of other games before I finish them... ;>)</span></div>Milkihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00956615301622763284noreply@blogger.com0